Group Settings
Every group creation involves four decisions beyond name and description. One is permanent, so pause before clicking Create.
The four knobs:
- Visibility — Open or Private. Changeable later.
- Posting mode — Normal, Broadcast, or Submission. Locked at creation. Cannot be changed.
- Crypto scheme — Elliptic Curve or CRYSTALS. Can be migrated later by an owner or manager.
- Preserve Chat History — off or on. Off by default. Changeable later, with consequences.
Visibility: Open vs. Private
Controls who can find a group, not who can do things in it.
Open — listed in the workspace's Browse Groups directory. Any non-Guest member can find the group and join freely. Use for company-wide spaces (announcements, general chat) and any group where you want low-friction discovery.
Private — hidden from the directory. Members can only be added by an Owner or Manager. Use for project teams, sensitive topics, leadership channels, customer-specific groups — anything where the membership list itself should not be discoverable.
Visibility can be changed later from the workspace admin panel; the most forgiving of the four decisions.
Posting mode: Normal, Broadcast, or Submission
This is the permanent one. Choose deliberately — if you pick wrong, the only remedy is a new group with members migrated over.
Posting mode answers two questions at once: who can send messages and who can read them.
- Normal — the standard collaborative group. Everyone except Observers can post and read everything.
- Broadcast — one-to-many announcement channel. Owners/Managers/workspace Admins post; everyone else observes.
- Submission — many-to-one intake. Anyone can post; only Owners and Managers can read.
The mental model: Normal is a round table, Broadcast is a stage, Submission is a drop box. See Posting Behaviors for the full breakdown of who can do what under each mode.
Crypto scheme: Elliptic Curve vs. CRYSTALS
The encryption used to protect the group's content. Two options today:
- CRYSTALS — post-quantum encryption. Recommended default for new groups.
- Elliptic Curve — traditional public-key encryption.
GLYPH is built on a crypto-agility framework — new schemes get added as they're standardized and approved. Expect more options over time.
Use CRYSTALS unless you have a specific reason not to. Not locked — an Owner or Manager can migrate later, provided all member devices are up to date. The reasoning behind post-quantum cryptography is unpacked in Security Model.
Preserve Chat History
Changes how much of a group's history is retrievable. A meaningful security tradeoff. Worth understanding before you flip it on.
Disabled (default, recommended) — messages live only on the devices participating in the group when those messages were sent. A new member added on day 30 sees nothing from days 1–29; they start clean. Nothing about the history is stored on the server.
Enabled — an encrypted copy of each message is stored on GLYPH's servers so newly added devices can download, decrypt, and view chat history from before they joined. Messages stay end-to-end encrypted in transit and at rest, but the server-side copy meaningfully expands the attack surface.
Per the platform's own guidance: enabling Preserve Chat History weakens the security of the group. It doesn't break the encryption model — but it removes a layer of forward secrecy you'd otherwise get for free.
Turn it on for long-running groups where context matters more than maximum security (e.g., an engineering project group where a new hire genuinely needs to read six months of design discussion to ramp).
Leave it off for sensitive operations, executive comms, legal/HR matters, incident response, or any group where the loss of a single device shouldn't also mean the loss of months of history.
Summary
Four knobs, one of them permanent (posting mode), one of them a meaningful security tradeoff (preserve history). Visibility and crypto are forgiving — you can fix those later. Slow down on the other two.